Fulfillment Update, End of January
about 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 02, 2021 at 12:06:20 AM

Hello everyone!

We're back to check in on the state of fulfillment for the project. Let's get right to it.

Fulfillment Update

Bad news first: we hit some supplier issues in January, and a good number of the orders are still outstanding as of today, including nearly all of the wood dice backers. We are doing everything we can to speed this up, but we're somewhat at the mercy of our suppliers and the mail carriers. We have around 20% of January orders outstanding as of this writing.

Of course, the good news is that about 80% of January orders were shipped out by the end of the month (2800+ orders). Apart from the wood dice, we're waiting on the material for the Eldritch Pact Tabletop Vaults. Those two segments of the orders make up the overwhelming majority.

Of course, any backer with an order that ships out after the last day of their estimated fulfillment month will receive a $25 Gyft Certificate to WyrmwoodGaming.com, usable there or (by request) in any Wyrmwood Kickstarter project, in accordance with our Kickstarter policy. We value your support and patience, and we're committed to taking our estimated deadlines seriously. Thank you all so much for your understanding as we work to alleviate these delays.

Pre-Orders: One Month Left

January marks the last full-size fulfillment tier, with a total of over 3,500 backers between the standard and wood rewards. After January, the remaining tiers are all smaller, wood tiers capped at 500 backers each. Thus we're considering this project as moving towards the end-game of fulfillment, and it's nearly time to shut down our pre-order store for Dice by Wyrmwood. We'll be closing down and turning off pre-orders at the end of this month, February 28th. Our goal will be to roll into fulfillment on those orders as soon as we finish up the final Kickstarter tiers. We'll be placing all necessary orders with our suppliers as soon as possible after pre-orders come to a close.

Next Steps

This was our largest and most-backed project to date when it concluded - it remains our most-backed project in terms of backer count, by a wide margin. We had to seriously up our game in terms of inventory and logistics, and our ability to handle shipping volume. We've taken notes from all of that and will certainly use it more in the future. So what about the future - what does it hold for Dice by Wyrmwood? We're glad you asked.

Due to the success of the first project, we've been thinking about a follow-up campaign, naturally. It probably won't come as a surprise to you that we've been thinking about it for some time, as a matter of fact - though only as we approach the end of fulfillment can we really start to work out the details. So as we close out fulfillment in the next few weeks and months, keep an eye out for information on what we have in store! Plans, timelines and more will start to emerge, just as soon as they begin to take shape, and we'll share those both here and on Wyrm Lyfe (our twice-weekly YouTube vlog). Each and every one of you helped get us to this point, and we think we have more to offer to the wonderful world of dice. Look for more information soon!

~ Wyrmwood

Mid-January Fulfillment Update
over 3 years ago – Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 07:10:30 AM

Hello everyone!

We're halfway into January, our largest remaining fulfillment wave. Let's check in and see where things stand.

Fulfillment Update

We got a bit of a late start shipping this month - the holidays put a great deal of stress on shipping services worldwide, so some of our orders have been delayed getting to us. Nonetheless, we're actively shipping January orders now, with several hundred having been shipped already.

Our plan is to ship at least 250 orders a day, upping that to closer to 400 on Mondays and Fridays, where we'll have extra shipping labor. This puts us on track to complete January on time at the end of the month. We're still waiting on some items from our partners, but everything is in progress or on the way, so we don't estimate any big hold-ups at this stage.

Address Changes

As we are already shipping, please let us know if your address needs a last-minute update. Let us know immediately if there's an issue with your address or if you've moved since you filled out your BackerKit survey.

Wyrm Lyfe: Season 7

Our YouTube vlog Wyrm Lyfe has returned, after an end-of-2020 hiatus. The third episode of Season 7 premieres later today - the first was our long-form 2020 retrospective (also including some never-before-seen footage), followed by this all-new episode that picks up where that leaves off. Wyrmwood has always been a hectic place, and 2020, a roller coaster of chaos for the entire world, was certainly no exception: forced lay-offs, rehiring (and then some), our biggest Kickstarter campaigns ever, expanding to a new facility... all in the middle of the storm of 2020. It was all there, but we made it, and 2021 holds more promise than any year in our history... if we can rise to the challenge. Will we? Only one way to find out. Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday & Friday. See the first all-new episode of season 7 right here:

Until next time, thanks for all of your help getting us through 2020 - we're glad to have made it through with you all. Talk to you soon!

~ Wyrmwood

End of December Fulfillment Update
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jan 02, 2021 at 02:22:52 AM

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year!

We sent out an update a bit over a week ago with some details on where things stood, but we just wanted to give you a rundown of how December turned out.

Fulfillment Update

As you're aware, we have been heavily focused on shipping out the December orders, with extra staff devoted to getting out everything possible before the month drew to a close. This effort worked quite well, but we did run into some shipping delays - something that it seems everyone in the world has been dealing with lately - that made it impossible to get everything out by the end of December 31st.

We received some needed dice from a supplier late on the 30th, which we were able to receive and process on the 31st. We got extra help to pitch in and get everything properly ready to ship, and began shipping about noon. By the end of the day, we were down to about 350 orders remaining in the month to be processed. Of course, we wish we could have hit 0, but given the delays we faced, we did everything possible to get out what we could by the end of the month. We'll pick back up and keep processing and shipping orders on Monday.

Kickstarter Policy, Late Orders

As a reminder, any order shipped out later than the last day of the estimated fulfillment month will include a complimentary physical $25 Gyft Certificate to WyrmwoodGaming.com. Kickstarter pledges are a unique way to order something, where you are pledging for and ordering items that do not yet exist. As such, production problems and delays can always happen, and inevitably will somewhere along the way, in our experience.

However, we have always taken our commitment to our Kickstarter backers very seriously, and that commitment extends not just to getting everyone what they pledged for, but doing it on the timetable we estimated, as well. While sometimes circumstances cause delays that we cannot prevent, we include these certificates as a way to make it up to you as best we can, and demonstrate our commitment to stand by our word in a concrete way. We hope it softens any disappointment in receiving your order later than anticipated, and we apologize for any inconvenience these delays cause.

New Year, New Dice

That about does it for this first update of 2021. We're moving forward to close out the outstanding orders and move into fulfilling the last big wave of the campaign, January, ASAP. We'll check in on the 15th with another update on how that's going. Until then, enjoy the new year... or, at least, enjoy that it's no longer the last one...

~ Wyrmwood

December Fulfillment Update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 09:26:56 PM

Hello, everyone.

We're about to break for the holiday here at Wyrmwood, but we wanted to give you all an update on how fulfillment for December is going before we do. Our next regular update will take place on January 1st, 2021.

Fulfillment Update

By end of day today, we expect to have fewer than 1,500 orders outstanding in the month (probably around 1,300). For reference, the December waves amount to 3,300 spots, so we're well over halfway through it now. We're still waiting on a few last products to arrive, which tracking indicates will be here early next week, as well as producing the last Vaults needed. Production is going well, with the one exception of the Savage & Quinn signature Tabletop Vault, which we may fall a bit short on. Nonetheless, all next week, as we detailed in our last update, we'll have extra hands in shipping to clear out everything before the end of the month.

And at the rate we're shipping orders, we'll certainly be able to do so. Anything that does not ship before December 31st will be due to unforeseen production issues or those shipping delays. Of course, we'll get those orders out as soon as possible afterwards, but the vast majority of orders should ship by next week.

Regarding shipping, for those of you awaiting shipments - please bear in mind that courier services are overwhelmed right now, and tracking information may be slow to update. The holidays are always a tough time for shipping, and this year things are much, much harder. But they are all doing their best to get everything delivered as quickly as possible.

With luck, you'll all have a great holiday this week, and hopefully this mostly positive note on the project's fulfillment status makes it a tiny bit better. Best wishes to you and yours, and we'll be in touch soon... next year!

~ Wyrmwood

Mid-December Fulfillment Update
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 10:51:41 PM

Hey everyone!

It's hard to believe, but the year is nearly over - Christmas is a mere ten days away. How can a year be so long and so short at the same time? Well, it's time for the final fulfillment update of 2020. Let's get to it.

Fulfillment Check-In and Outlook

This month poses a unique challenge for us. Generally, as veteran backers may know, we do not offer fulfillment tiers in December, due to competing with holiday shipping - our website order volume always spikes in November and December, and we don't want to jeopardize both by biting off more than we can chew.

However, this is actually less of a shipping issue and more of a production one, since most of our projects are entirely produced by us, in our shop. Shipping can scale up quickly quite well - it's not too hard to double our shipping staffing and throughput. But doubling production? That's just not possible on any short-term basis. With this project, though, Wyrmwood in-house production was a minority of items and orders - only Dice Vaults and Tabletop Vaults, which are among our most efficient, streamlined items from a production standpoint. Not only that, but these orders are actually quite easy to ship, in most cases - small packages and padded mailers. That means we can ship more of them, faster.

That was one consideration in offering a December wave in this campaign. The other factor was that our campaign's timing meant the first wave would be delivered in November, We hated the idea of having one tier, then a 2-month delay into the next year for the next waves - that seemed like a poor experience for backers.

So, we decided to offer a December tier and go for it. Which brings us to the big question... was that a stupid thing to do? Have we, in the parlance of our times, "done goofed?"

And the answer is... No. At least, we don't think so!

Well, okay, that's the short answer.

The Longer Answer

The longer answer is that we are facing some unique challenges this year, as everyone is, and we've had a busy holiday season, which is great. But it has meant that we're shipping more packages this holiday than ever before... and that's without the added order volume of this campaign.

Normally, we ship out around 300-500 orders a day. In the past couple of weeks, we've added extra staff to shipping and extra stations, and yesterday we shipped around 1300 or 1400 packages. We are going to maintain this staffing level until both the holiday orders and the December Dice Kickstarter pledges are all shipped out.

As a huge amount of the website orders we're fulfilling are gifts for the holidays, we're currently prioritizing those orders, and will do so for all orders that come in by tomorrow night. After those are shipped out, website shipping will effectively halt entirely until all Dice Kickstarter orders we can possibly ship before the end of the month are on their way. We should be able to get through everything next week, just before we close up for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. If necessary, we'll resume shipping the campaign when we open up on the 28th, as well.

Given the unorthodox nature of this fulfillment, we'll send out another brief update next week to let you know where things stand and how successful we've been. But with approximately 94% of the necessary items for December in hand already (the remainder is on the way, with some of our Vaults in production), orders locked, and extra staff working overtime to get everything out, we're confident we'll be getting a huge volume out the door before the end of the month.

The biggest challenge looks to be some of the collaboration Vaults - particularly the Savage & Quinn model, due to the Katalox material it's made from. We've reached out to backers from December that selected this item with an optional upgrade to Purpleheart, instead, which will allow us to complete things a bit faster - if you're one of those backers, please be sure to reply ASAP so we can make the change. We're producing Vaults in the meantime, and you'll need to opt-in before we fulfill your order, obviously! :)

And that about does it for this update. We hope you're all staying safe and warm out there, and looking forward to the holidays. Take some time to relax and recover... it's been a long, long year. As always, thanks for your support.

~ Wyrmwood